Name: Till Death Do Us Part (candy floss pink, racing green, pigment red)
Brand: Damien Hirst
Rating: 4.9 (183 reviews)

Meaning & Analysis

Till Death Do Us Part (candy floss pink, racing green, pigment red) is a screen print from Damien Hirst’s Till Death Do Us Part series from 2012. The print shows a flattened image of a human skull, rendered in highly saturated colours. The skull is printed in dark green with the facial features contoured in red and set against a pink backdrop.

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This series is reminiscent of Andy Warhol’s ten-part screen print Skulls series from 1976. Before Hirst, Warhol repeated a single image of the human skull across an entire series, rendering each print in different saturated and contrasting colour combinations. Hirst is consciously playing on this citation, shoring up concerns from Pop Art around mass-media imagery and the democratisation of high art. Furthermore, Hirst’s use of vivid non-naturalistic colours is at odds with the morbid subject matter, producing a jarring effect that shores up ideas around the human condition.

It is only in the later stages of Hirst’s career that he has become interested in prints and editions. His first print portfolio was produced in 1999 and was a set of screen prints that depicted medicine bottle labels. Since his first print portfolio, Hirst has produced many prints and editions like those in the Till Death Do Us Part series and are a major part of his oeuvre.